It is getting towards the end of the tomato season, and time to weigh up how they have done, and whether I am going to do them next year, and if so which. I have not been anything like organised enough to actually weigh the edible crop off each variety, but I have a pretty good idea how well they've done relative to each other. All were grown in the greenhouse in growbags, three to a bag.
First off, the cherry tomatoes. I grew 'Sungold' again this year, a yellow F1 hybrid said by the man from Thompson and Morgan who talked to Suffolk Plant Heritage a couple of years ago to be the sweetest tomato there is, although according to Gardeners' World there are sweeter varieties around. Tomato sweetness is measured on the Brix scale, and is dependent on the mixture of sugar and acidity. When I was looking that up just now because I had forgotten what the scale was called, I stumbled upon a site run by somebody called Wayne Schmidt who personally tested the sweetness of his early tomatoes using an electroni pH meter and a refractometer. He confimed that 'Sungold' scored well because it had very low acidity. I tested the sweetness of my tomatoes by eating them, and can confirm that 'Sungold' was very tasty. The only difficulty I found was that they split easily, so much so that I ended up using flower snips to cut through the stalks when picking them rather than pulling the fruit off the plant. Curiously, Wayne Schmidt said that 'Sungold' appeared almost impervious to cracking, which just goes to show how differently plants can behave depending on how they're grown. 'Sungold' was the first to start cropping, and there aren't many tomatoes left to come, even green ones. The plants were prolific while they lasted. Conclusion: I would happily grow 'Sungold' next year.
I also grew a red cherry variety, 'Sweet Million', another F1 hybrid. I was pleased with them too. The plants were slightly later to start fruiting than 'Sungold' and still have quite a lot of fruit on that looks as though it has a sporting chance of ripening. They showed very little propensity to split, tasted good, and made an attractive mixture with the yellow cherries in salad. Conclusion: I would grow 'Sweet Million' again next year as well.
I'm not so sure about the brown cherry variety 'Chocolate Cherry', yet another F1. I ended up with one odd plant after half the seedlings I was raising myself stopped growing, and I had to scuttle around the local garden centres and the trollies outside Waitrose seeing what I could get to replace them. The brown fruits did look fun with the red and pale orange, and tasted fine, though the skins were maybe a little bit tough. One problem was that I wasn't very efficient about picking them, there being only the one plant and the brown fruit not standing out visually, so quite a few ended up on the greenhouse floor and being fed to the chickens. My sole plant didn't seem to crop as generously as the other two cherry varieties, but I think this was partly because it got too dry one day and several clusters of flowers aborted. It is not really fair making a comparison on such a small sample, but it could be that 'Chocolate Cherry' is not as forgiving of erratic watering as some of the other varieties. Conclusion: I wouldn't devote a whole growbag to this variety, but might grow one plant for fun and would know to try harder with the watering.
I also tried a brown beefsteak variety, 'Black Russian', because someone from the upmarket commune that I used to work with at the plant centre told me it was the best flavoured tomato ever and I must grow it, a sentiment echoed on internet discussions of tomatoes. The chickens would be able to tell you more about the flavour than I can, because every time I found a fruit that looked brown, juicy and ready to pick, I found it had split. The plants proved very difficult to keep wet enough in their growbags, and when they got dry the flowers tended to drop off, while fruit that had already set developed blossom end rot. On the other hand, the fruit that were almost right did look very tempting. Conclusion: I might try once more with 'Black Russian' but only with a better growing system, and I wouldn't do three plants, maybe share a bag between them and 'Chocolate Cherry' and try and get my eye in for harvesting brown fruits.
I did one classic round red tomato, 'Ailsa Craig', and could see why this variety has been around for sixty years. My three plants set lots of fruit, which did not split, did not abort their flowers, and did not on the whole suffer from blossom end rot. I have already picked more than we needed to cook with at the time, and there is more to come which are already large and pink enough to make me think they will ripen in due course. I can't actually report on the flavour eaten raw because we have kept using the cherries, but we cooked with some and they seemed perfectly nice and tomato flavoured. I don't really fancy a tomato at this minute but I must make sure to eat one raw in a spirit of enquiry to find out what they are like. Conclusion: 'Ailsa Craig' is worth growing on account of its yield, relative earliness, and tolerance of my less than perfect watering regime.
I grew two different types of plum tomato on account of having to scrabble round for replacement plants, and it's just as well, since the two 'Roma' I bought as young plants are doing much better than the three 'Follia' grown from seed, an F1 hybrid from Mr Fothergill. 'Roma' is an open pollinated variety that's been around for ages and I don't know how much variety there is among plants sold under that name. Unfortunately as there are so many different tomatoes growing in the greenhouse and potentially cross pollinating each other it wouldn't be worth saving seed from the plants I bought. 'Roma' has set a lot of fruit and has not been prone to blossom end rot or splitting. The Systems Administrator cooked with some and said they peeled very easily because the skins were thick, though by the same token they needed peeling. They have been late to ripen, and the SA who has grown plum tomatoes in the past says they always are. That is one advantage of growing them alongside an earlier large round variety like 'Ailsa Craig'. In contrast, 'Follia' has set few fruit and most of those that ripened had blossom end rot and have gone to the chickens. Conclusion: If I grow tomatoes next year I will get 'Roma' seed and give more space to them, but 'Follia' F1 seems to be a bad case of plant breeders taking something that worked perfectly well before and making it worse in the cause of novelty.
The growing bags I used this year and last were Westland Gro-Sure from The Range. They are relatively expensive as growing bags go, which I found interesting in that The Range don't normally offer premium products, and the reason why they cost about twice as much as some growbags is probably that they contain much better compost. I could tell it was really nice compost by how much better the plants in the growbags did than a couple of spare seedlings I stuck in pots of ordinary B&Q multi-purpose. The bags were fed with proprietary tomato food but not so often as they should have been because it was so difficult getting water into them. It was also difficult telling when they needed watering, and by half way through the summer I'd decided that if I did this again I was decanting the contents of the bags into individual pots, so that I could see how wet the surface was and heft them individually to feel the weight. This year and last The Range was doing the bags at a cheaper individual rate if bought in multiples of two, and they sold out fairly early in the season. Other growbags are available (lots of them) but I was impressed by the compost in these.
Overall I feel I am almost but not quite there growing tomatoes under glass. If I totted up the cost of the bags, the seed, the emergency young plants, the liquid tomato food, and the string, it would probably have bought me about the same quantity of tomatoes in Waitrose. Excluding the underperforming varieties the maths would look better, and home grown tomatoes fresh from the plant are very delicious. And the chickens have enjoyed the split 'Sungold' and 'Black Russian' and don't seem fussed about blossom end rot.
The other slight issue is that we share the cooking, and the Systems Administrator does not want to be obliged to cook with tomatoes at every meal. If I get a final glut of 'Roma' I could skin and freeze them, or the SA might feel motivated to make passata. In the meantime the fridge has been cluttered for the past fortnight with little pots holding successive pickings of cherry tomatoes.
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